The Oldest Recorded Origin Of ZERO

Carved into a sheer rock face, Chaturbhuj temple, also known as the temple of the four armed Lord, stands on the eastern approach to the Gwalior Fort. Dedicated to Lord Vishnu, the temple is said to have been constructed in 876 AD.

It is most famous for the world’s one of the oldest known zero inscribed onto stone. Inside the temple, there is an idol of Lord Vishnu and the inscription with the zero.

The inscription inside the temple, the number “270” circled in red. The inscription records the date as 876 AD, and documents the dimensions of a land grant to a neighbouring temple along with size of a daily gift of flowers to be paid for from an endowment made to this temple.

Until quite recently it was believed the Gwalior Zero was the oldest known inscription of zero in the world.

In 2017, the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries said that radiocarbon dating conducted on the Bakhshali manuscript, a text that contains hundreds of zeroes..

denoted by dots, revealed that it dates from the 3rd or 4th century Common Era. That makes it around 500 years older than researchers previously believed. Bakhshali manuscript was found buried in a village called Bakhshali near Peshawar, in what is now part of Pakistan, in 1881.

It consists of 70 fragile leaves of birch bark and has been kept by the Bodleian Library since 1902.

While both the ancient Mayans and Babylonians also used zero as a placeholder symbol, it was the ancient Indians who developed it into a number of its own accord,

pioneering the idea of nothingness as a mathematical concept, a key event in the history of mathematics. Over time, the dots found in the Bakhshali manuscript evolved into the hollow-centred symbol that we know as the zero today.

References: Quartz India and Kevin Standage Blog

@desi_thug1
@Sanjay_Dixit
@InfoVedic
@LostTemple7
@TVMohandasPai